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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

More WiBro Export Success--an Auspicious Start

With the news that Samsung Electronics has signed deals to export Korea's WiBro technology to Taiwan and Kuwait, it is beginning to appear that this technology will be another big export success story. As reported in the Digital Chosun Ilbo Samsung Electronics is now involved in commercial or pilot projects with 23 firms in 19 countries, including the United States, Japan, Russia, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Venezuela.>
U.S. technology market researcher ABI Research forecast that the WiBro market will grow from US$3.5 billion in 2008 to $59.6 billion in 2012, with the number of subscribers increasing from 12 million to 280 million.
I had a chance to personally test WiBRO at a recent conference in Seoul dealing with Ultra Broadband issues. Korea Telecom put all of the conference participants on a bus and we each had a notebook computer equipped with a very compact WiBro modem. I enjoyed the demonstration and had no trouble viewing video on CNN while the bus was cruising along the Han River at more than 100 kilometers per hour. The "law of mobility" or "McGuire's" law states that the value of a product increases with mobility. A simple measure of mobility is the percent of time the product is available for your use.
I predict great success for WiBRO in Korea and in markets around the world. The reason is that it draws on the power of the law of mobility by making the internet itself more mobile!